Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

  “Petunia? Is that her real name?” Approver, Petunia: Jess had gone through more melodramatic incarnations than Debby DiMartino.

  “My pretty Petunia. Alias Miss Free Love from Fresno alias Jeanne alias Magda alias …”

  “What was your mother’s name, Mom?”

  “Get the fuck off my property. You’re fucking trespassing. Ham? Why the hell isn’t he back? How long does it take to pick up a pack of pitas, for chrissake?”

  “What was her name?”

  “Leave her out of this. Mother’s been dead thirty years.”

  “Iris?”

  “Get off the boat or I’ll call the cops!”

  “Not your boat, Mom. You don’t have the right to order me off.”

  Romeo chortled. “You make me proud, little Devi. Now my turn to take over.” He pinned Jess’s body against the rail, unlocked the cuffs he’d only just put on her and closed his killer hands around her shoulders. “My pretty Petunia.” He scrunched her shoulder blades together, and squeezed. I winced. She twisted her chin as far back over her shoulder as she could and spat. He laughed, let go of one shoulder, whipped out a handkerchief and wiped drool off her chin. “Keys,” he said to me. “I need the keys to your motor, little Devi. You don’t mind, do you?” He reached for my purse and yanked. The shoulder strap snapped. He stole the whole purse instead of just the keys. “I’ll bring the motor back, not to worry, kid. Ta-ta!”

  Dad shoved and dragged Mom; Mom cursed Dad all the way to my car. I couldn’t have stopped them even if I’d wanted to. Dad had the 9mm, the cuffs, the strangler’s hands. Maybe Mom’s time had come.

  I stayed on the deck, rocking back and forth on my heels in time to the rocking of Last Chance. The waves lapped the sides, higher, faster, stronger. I listened to seagulls, I sang with mermaids and waited for Ham to skid back into my life on the worn-smooth tires of his Triumph. And he did, could have been a half hour later, could have been longer than that; all I know is that by then sea and sky were communing.

  “Hey, Day-Vee, hi!” He stuck his head out and waved. Women complications he could handle. “Your boss tell you she sent me for the one brand of pita bread they don’t sell in Sausalito?” He hefted a small sack off the passenger seat and joined me on the deck. No ghosts, no purple auras, no angel halos: just a longhaired smiling man in a red polo shirt and white baggies, hugging dips and munchies. “What’s up?”

  What’s up? Oh, nothing much, Ham. What’s up? I’ll tell you, starting with, Your friend and squeeze, Jess, Jeanne, Iris-Daughter or whoever, helped Romeo Hawk or Haque or Haq kill a total of seventeen men and women, nearly choke to death a no-name baby of no fixed address, bump off Fred … You want more?

  “Jess just stepped out.”

  “In future, call before you show up.” He led me into the cabin all the same. A quick kiss before emptying the deli items, then another kiss, this time long, rough and ardent. “Catfights prohibited on Last Chance,” he whispered. He found my nipples with his teeth.

  “I don’t do jealous, Ham.”

  “That’s why you turn me on, hon.” The nibbling and biting continued. “So what brought you?”

  “My author turned out to be Jess’s best friend from way back when. He planned the surprise visit, I went along because he was the client. The surprise worked, I guess. They took my car and went for a spin.”

  “Which leaves us just enough indiscretion time, hon?”

  I said, “What’s that romantic aroma? The Ham Cohan Valentine Special Roast Chicken?”

  “I lucked out. Happy Valentine!”

  The secret of the sexes was suddenly apparent to me. Clueless jerks who can’t get their underwear on straight still have the priceless women. It’s on all the sitcoms, it’s the imponderable, it’s what makes the world go round. It’s got to stop. I settled among beat-up cushions on the kilimcovered banquette and watched Ham rinse clean a wineglass and paper-towel it dry before pouring a splash of Zinfandel into it. There wasn’t more left in the bottle. He didn’t reach for another wine from the rack behind him. He wasn’t inviting me to stay for dinner.

  The soundtrack of The Big Easy was playing on the CD player “… Got to be closer to you … wrapped in your arms, holding you tight, whispering faintly, baby, deep in the night …” Ham and Jess had been getting in Valentine mood when we apparitioned on the houseboat. You kill the past only if you have the know-how to survive hauntings.

  I leaned a lazy finger on the rewind button. When I let it up, the singer was reminiscing about lace curtains, willow trees, rustling bedsheets. I didn’t have to listen to someone else’s nostalgia “… the smell of the morning in the rainy lane …”

  A wartime memory that Larry once shared popped into my head. “You know what I remember best about the place,” he said. “The swallows. Blue swallows, goddamn swarms of them getting in your face. It was beautiful! I wouldn’t have missed Nam for anything.”

  I didn’t care if too much Dexedrine had turned crows and sparrows into a blue blanket of swallows. Eighteen-year-old Larry Flagg had gone into the war with a fuck-with-me-and-you’re-dead attitude; Loco Larry had come out of it with a postcard-pretty souvenir.

  I turned up the volume. “If I said that I loved you, would you turn away … well, that’s all right, baby, ’cos I already know … believe me, baby, we got no choice …” I saw Larry, Ham, me, chasing aquamarine birds down terraced fields of emerald. “ ‘Come here,’ ” I sang along with the tape, patting the cozy space beside me, “ ‘come here, come here, come here, got to be closer to you.’ ”

  “Got to check on the roast,” Ham said. “Wonder what’s keeping them, must have a lot to catch up on.” He slipped on a starched, white, professional-chef’s apron. “The trick to perfect chicken is a five-hundred-degree oven. I learned that from my last ex.”

  I kicked my shoes off, and stretched my legs out on the banquette. The big toe of my right foot touched the boom-box’s STOP button, then traced huge hearts on the plush velvet nap of a cushion. I felt like pulling up anchor, dancing naked on deck, steering Last Chance into the eye of Hurricane Faustine. The boat tuned in to my mood, rocked on violent waves.

  Ham got off on the subject of ex-wives. “Tess gave me the apron,” he said. “You’ve met Tess, right? She was at Fred’s wake?” He yanked down the door of the oven. A whoosh of hot, spicy air made his face red. “The mitts, cap and apron were her divorce-anniversary present. She was a CIA dropout.”

  “You were married to a spy?”

  “CIA as in the Culinary Institute of America.” Ham was recharging bitterness. “I got the Wüsthof knives in the settlement, the Chinese meat cleaver, the Japanese woks, the All-Clad pots. She kept the house.”

  I arched my neck. Frankie once told me that I had the sexiest neck and clavicle he’d ever seen. Ham didn’t notice the seductive stretch.

  “There’s justice, though. In the Oakland fire, the house went up in smoke.”

  “What do you have to be so bitter about, Ham?”

  He caught me eyeing the table set for two, the speckled orchid, the colored candles. “I’m not bitter. Who says I’m bitter? Did I ask for any insurance money?”

  “Thanks for inviting me to stay for dinner,” I joked. “I’d love to. How about a splash more wine?”

  Ham reached behind him and plucked the bottle nearest him off the wine rack. It was another red. “Who’s this friend that Jess’s dumped us for? What’s he written?”

  “She met him in Asia.”

  “Oh, Asia. She really did Asia.” He uncorked the bottle. “That makes the guy a hippie burnout.”

  “If you’re part ethnic Chinese, part French Vietnamese, definitely part Pakistani and part you-never-figured-out-what, what does that make you?”

  “Not a bad Merlot,” Ham said. He carried the bottle and two paper cups to the banquette, and slid in beside me. “The city council in the People’s Republic of Berkeley?”

  I unlaced his running shoes. He finally took the hint, and pl
ayed along, easing his feet out of the shoes. I peeled off his socks. No Mona Lisas on these socks. Just over-washed, yellowing white absorbent cotton. “And if you add half Californian to it all?” My toes stroked the feet’s pale, clammy arches.

  Ham kissed me on the lips. “Trouble?” He kissed me again.

  “Force of nature,” I reminded him.

  “A fault creep,” he amended, working on the metal button of his baggies.

  “What’s that?” I shrugged my shirt off.

  Ham explained between kisses. About creeping and gliding and sliding movements along fault lines, pleasant pressure—“think of yourself as the Bay Area with fault lines running through,” he said, “and your body is being worked on by a master masseur”—and then, wham, bang, whoa! the Big One breaks the body in two. He calculated creep rates with his lips on my fingers, slip rates on my toes. “Happens every hundred years or so,” he whispered. “I don’t want to be around for the Big Quake.”

  A quickie on a banquette in a houseboat may be no competition for acid-high sex with god-demon-snakeman, but for one nanosecond that night my brain could sleep. The immediate past and the about-to-happen both receded. It was my oldest past that suddenly surged forward.

  I was on a country bus, tasting dust and diesel. My new Bata sandals were wedged between someone’s dirty metal trunk and someone else’s stacked-high baskets of live fowl. My feet were going to sleep inside the pretty canvas shoes. The man beside me said to pinch the littlest toe of each foot. The man next to him kept spitting out the open window. His spit was the color of blood. I imagined blood-red betel-juice stains on the sister’s funny clothes.

  I am crying because the woman is crying. I can hear long, low sobs again, smell vomit again, press my face deep into Mommy’s lap again. Daddy shouts, Shut her up or I’ll do it myself. Mommy giggles. I want for us both to get back in the car again. I want for us to drive home. I don’t want to listen for the grass to absorb a body’s clumsy fall. This is not the first time I’ve buried my head in Mommy’s lap so I shan’t have to see or hear or know. Callused hands grip my throat. The world wraps itself in blackness.

  Better that I had been the fetus Jess aborted. “Ham,” I murmured, “why didn’t you ask Jess to marry you?”

  “The times, love. Marriage and commitment were for the bourgeois.” He tucked his shirt back into his pants.

  “You should have married her.” I kicked Ham’s shoes and socks across the floor. The kick was harder than I’d intended. One shoe thudded against the base of the counter. A bowl of olives crashed to the floor. They were the big, green, deli kind, an almond jammed into each of them. I didn’t make a move to clean up.

  “But then we’d never have met.” Ham ripped lengths of paper towel. The bowl was a fifties stoneware ugly, the kind that shows up in decor magazines. The chipped pieces and china flakes were easy to pick off wetted paper towel. The olives left a dull smear on the polished wood floor. He tossed the clunky, squishy garbage and raised his paper cup of wine. “To roads not taken!”

  “You’d have spared me my … my violent propensities.”

  “Propensities?” He laughed. “I like your violent propensities. Sounds like a designer perfume. Pro-pen-sity by Devi Dee! Propensity. Give me a break!” He ambled over to where the other running shoe had scudded to rest. “Anyway, what’s my old life with Jess got to do with you?”

  “Everything.”

  He was on his hands and knees, fumbling for socks, when we both heard the footsteps out on the deck. One pair of shoes with hard leather soles that slapped wood. Ham scrambled to his feet. Not Jess’s sandals, definitely not Jess’s power-walker stride. I couldn’t tell from his face if he was anxious or if he was relieved. “She couldn’t have been in a car crash, Dr. Watson,” he said. “That doesn’t sound like cop feet bringing bad news.”

  Romeo cheetah-walked in on us. I don’t know what fabric his vanilla suit was made of. No stain, no crease, undermined its elegance. Only his eyes had a jailbird glower. He said, those eyes on Ham standing awkwardly with socks in his hands, “We had our chat, little Devi. Very satisfactory.”

  “Ham Cohan.” He balled up a sock, dropped it, held out a hand. “Hey, man, where’s Jess?”

  No match for Bio-Dad. Poor Ham, caught in one of fate’s sting operations. I wouldn’t let him end up expendable.

  “In the car.” Romeo thrust out a hand. A sapphire cuff link winked in lamplight.

  “She shouldn’t have trouble parking.” Ham gave the killer hand a quick, polite shake. “There were lots of spaces when I came back from the store. Anyway, can I get you a drink?” He shuffled to the galley, stretched for a wineglass. A real one, not a plastic cup.

  Romeo joined Ham, reached across the butcher-block counter of the galley and picked up the opened bottle.

  I felt woozy at the coziness of it all. “What’s Jess doing in the car?”

  “None of this sissy sweet stuff,” Romeo said. “I need a real drink.”

  “What’s she doing?” I repeated.

  “How about a beer?”

  Romeo swiveled his torso a half dozen times. A workout freak warming up for action. “Practicing breathing, little Devi.” He laughed.

  “What?” Ham stuck his face in Romeo’s. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Who do you want me to be, Mr. Movie Man?” Romeo batted Ham’s face away with his palm. “And she isn’t doing a very good job of the breathing thing, Movie Man.”

  Ham grabbed the Merlot bottle and cracked Romeo but not a good one. The vanilla suit showed up pink streaks and blotches.

  Romeo clicked his tongue. “Not much good at rough stuff, are we, Mr. Movie Man?”

  Ham lunged for Romeo’s tie. Romeo was a man of quicker reflexes. He gripped Ham’s throat in those killer hands. “Big-stick bullies, you Americans,” he sneered.

  Ham’s eyes bulged, his knees sagged, his voice box let out gaspy, growly sounds. When Romeo finally let go, the body thudded to the floor. I jumped.

  “What was that?” Romeo grinned. “A quake?” He hauled Ham’s body by the feet inside the galley ell. “There was this warden I had a nice thing going with, hash for deutsche marks and pound sterling. The warden chap went down heavier than Mr. Movie Man, and he couldn’t have weighed more than sixty, sixty-five kilos.”

  “What did Ham ever do to you?” I crawled as far from him as I dared. The cabin was cramped, but not with the kind of furniture you can crouch under.

  “Nothing.” He lifted Ham’s limp body by Ham’s gray ponytail nearly off the floor. “Everything.” He slammed Ham’s head, facedown, on the butcher-block counter, and pinned it with an elbow. “How much blood does a dead wimp bleed, little Devi?”

  I threw up on the scatter rug, splattering Ham’s running shoes.

  Romeo laughed. “Don’t spoil the fun.” He snatched the Chinese meat cleaver off its galley wall peg. He whacked the blade on the base of Ham’s neck. Whack! Whack! The blade got stuck in Ham. “Shit! I’ve lost the wrist, the snap. No practice.” Romeo kept cursing as he worked to ease the blade out of bone.

  I pressed my face into the rug; I smelled the sour smells of Ham’s shoes, my vomit. I heard a final swish! and crack! Then the thump of Ham’s severed head falling to the floor.

  Romeo nudged me gently with his boot. Snakeskin rubbed my arm. When I squinted up, he was standing over me, cleaver in hand, and sucking on a miniature bottie of whiskey, the kind Pappy saved from plane trips. FREEZE TAPE.

  “Need a drink?” He pulled another bottle out of his pinkish suit pocket. This time it was vodka. “Take a sip, go on.” I thought of Aloysius Fong hitting the bottle in the wings, just before going onstage. Nerves, not guilt. “Hey, what was that?” He staggered.

  I’d felt the wave too. “Never spent time on water?” I mocked.

  “What do you keep in your waters? Jaws?” He stumbled again.

  Violent propensities. The sea has them, the Earth rocks with them. I claim my inheritance, kneeing Bio-Dad so
hard as he tilts his head back to draw from the tiny bottle that it tumbles him. TAPE ROLLING. The cleaver fuses to my arm. It soars and plunges, soars and plunges. “Monster!” I scream. I keep screaming as I cradle Ham’s tormented face to my bosom. I am screaming as I dial 911.

  Epilogue

  Physicists and fantasists suspect that someday there will be one simple equation to express and explain all the problems of all the galaxies. My big toe, which got Ham all horny, is also the TOE: the Theory of Everything. The mysteries of our universe become more mysterious as they grow ever more accessible. The symmetry of asymmetry.

  What was it that I’d read in Yanofsky’s I Winked, the Stars Wobbled? The world you see isn’t the world you get Ninety percent of it lurks out of your sight Invisible matter is the cosmic glue holding reckless galaxies in place.

  I am that dark, ghost, thing.

  The quarks and electrons that make up villains and heroes also make the coffins we’re laid to rest in, and the earth we molder in, and the maggots we fatten, and the stars that shine on us after our worlds vanish.

  Destiny works itself out in bizarre loops. I made the 911 call. Domestic dispute, I told the dispatcher. Let them find out how bloody. I heard the urgent police sirens, I waited a long while for the waist chains, handcuffs, leg shackles. And just when I prayed for my misery to be over, the waves rocked wild and heaved Last Chance free of its moorings. The houseboat skimmed a molten gold sea carrying its cargo of dead and living towards a horizon on flames, I heard mermaids sing and police sirens screech, but not for me, not that night the Big One hit, with fires rimming the Bay like some nighttime eruption, with the night sky pink, reflecting off the fog, the sparks flying down like fiery rain, sky hissing into sea.

  A Conversation with Bharati Mukherjee

  Q: Where did the idea for Leave It to Me come from?

  BM: About twenty years ago, while I was spending a year in Delhi, India, the Delhi police made big news by arresting an Asian serial killer and three of his white, hippie, women accomplices. The man was said to have befriended, then robbed and killed—in very grisly ways—tourists from Europe, the United States, and Canada. The accomplices were vulnerable young backpackers who had succumbed to the serial killer’s physical attractiveness and charisma.